Herd instincts?

messagenews: snipped-for-privacy@hovnanian.com

And Dubbya talks about encouraging democracy in Pakistan, while supporting yet one more example of the right-wing military dictatorships that the U.S. seems to have found so useful over the years.

It may have escaped your notice, but politicians have been known to lie from time to time.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

messagenews: snipped-for-privacy@hovnanian.com

messagenews: snipped-for-privacy@hovnanian.com

Poor logic there, While lying is endemic amongst politicians, the capacity to lie isn't the basic political skill, which is expertise in reading and manipulating other people. And while I might have the capacity to lie successfully - I don't know if I do because I don't make a habit of lying - it isn't a capacity that you can attribute to me, since - as far as I know - it's not a skill that I've practised on this user group.

Quite a few people have accused me of lying, because they don't believe the information I've presented, but that isn't quite the same thing. If you don't believe me, prove that I'm wrong.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

--- LOL, while you may not be very good at it, that's precisely what you try to do here with your never-ending river of diatribe and invective. I suppose that makes you a wannabe politician who's too lazy to campaign for office. Kind of in the same way that keeps you from looking for work, huh?

Yeah, yeah, I know...

I've heard it a thousand times before; it's not your fault, the Dutch don't like to hire old men

---

--- That's not true. ;)

---

--- OK.

From:

snipped-for-privacy@c29g2000hsa.googlegroups.com

"Jim is - as usual - out of touch with reality - which probably helps him present his (admittedly above average) design skills as if he was another Bob Widlar, Hans Camenzind or Barry Gilbert. Guys like that do get hired, but they don't last - and Jim did leave Motorola because they didn't want to keep on using his team."

First, the presumption is that since you purport to be a judge of who's in touch with reality and who isn't, then in order to be qualified to make that judgment _you_ must be in touch with reality.

Second, I suggest that if Jim does have the presentation skills you mention, then he is very much _in_ touch with reality in that he knows what to do to in order to sell himself and his stuff in the real world.

Finally, since if follows naturally that Jim is _clearly_ in touch with reality and you claim that he isn't, that means that your statement that he isn't is untrue, ergo a lie, which makes _you_ a liar. Either that or _you're_ the one who's out of touch with reality and believes the statement that Jim isn't, to be true.

-- JF

Hate to even admit Slowman exists, but...

Slowman:

Truth: Probably why I was asked to sub for an ill Barrie Gilbert at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1986 for a week-long seminar presentation... my own material by the way.

Truth: Motorola asked for an across-the-board 20% lay-off. I refused to lay-off any of my department. Motorola pushed... I responded by laying myself off. ALL of my team quit and joined me at Dickson Electronics... verifiable FACT.

John Fields:

This actually happened this past summer at Honeywell, Plymouth, MN...

I was presenting a simplification to Honeywell's circuit implementation while contending with a young buck constantly interrupting... clearly not understanding.

Finally a manager told the young buck to sit down and shut up, "...so we can hear how an old master would solve our problem" ;-)

Then a tornado went zooming by the building... I kid you not :-(

...Jim Thompson

I usually call down lightning bolts, for a more traditional effect.

John

My style also, but I was off my pace that day... those time zone changes really screw me up ;-)

...Jim Thompson

My comment wasn't limited to politicians. It's been true of all the grass root revolutionaries.

Dontcha just hate it when you fly and drive all day, barely get any sleep, drink bad coffee, get lost trying to find the customer's meeting place, and walk into a room full of engineers and managers who expect a performance? A few years ago, I did this with *20* people in the room. I had some hand-scribbled sketches I'd done on the plane, bumpy ride no less, so they grabbed them from me and stuck them in the overhead projector. Whew. I think we've just sold the 400th resulting VME module.

That performance was worth roughly a million dollars per hour. I should join the actor's union.

John

The French situation is interesting. Pretty soon, everybody in the country will be on strike against themselves. That's a logical consequence of a society where collectivism becomes dominant.

John

Interesting place, France, a "sécurité sociale" office on every corner ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Oddly enough, I do know the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology - when I was getting my Ph.D. at Melbourne University, RMIT was the local technical school where they trained electronics apprentices. Then some politician waved his magic wand over the place and it became a degree-granting tertiary institution.

I'm not surprised they hired you to do a seminar presentation - the surprise is that Barrie Gilbert could ever have been conned into consenting to waste his time there. He presumably got sick when he found out a bit more about the place. Analog Devices do spread him around a little - they brought him to Cambridge Instruments once in the late 1980's. Interesting guy, but we weren''t really going to be interested in using the integrated circuits he was working on at the time.

And how does that differ from what I wrote? Your version does make you sound more noble than mine does, but your comment on my employment situation also ignores stuff that I happen to consider to be relevant.

Presentation skills involve filleting reality to create the desired impression - there are two examples earlier in this thread. In effect it is an exercise shedding inconvenient bits of reality.

John Fields is putting a lot of weight on that pathetic "_clearly_".

Seems right. There's obviously a bag of wind involved in the story somewhere.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I.

Glendower, trying to impress the Prince, says, "I can call spirits from the vasty deep."

And Hotspur replies, "Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?"

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The US isn't all that far from pretty much the same situation - have you been watching the antics in Holly-weird?

Cheers! Rich

And modern Fabian-style socialists are not revolutionaries. They join perfectly respectable political parties and work via the ballot box. If I had a vote in the Netherlands I'd have a choice of two - De Partij van de Arbeit (The Labour Party) and the Socialist Partij. The Socialist Partij is a bit too far left for my taste.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Invective? Diatribe is in the eye of the beholder, but if you want invective you need Phil Alison or Richard Steven Walz.

I was membership secretary for my local Labour Party ward in England for a couple of years around 1990, mainly because I had a home computer that would run the membership software, and I got to see political people in action - I don't have those skills.

I do look for work - it is a condition of my unemployment benefit that I apply for a least one job a week, and I don't have any trouble finding jobs to apply for. It's been more than a year since I even got an interview, which is rather frustrating - there is a real shortage of electronic engineers in the Netherlands at moment, and jobs that I could do keep on getting readvertised. I reapply for them every few months, though it is obviously a waste of time.

Or women. The current administration talks up a storm about keeping the elderly in th work force, but they don't do a thing about removing any of the bureaucratic barriers. At the moment, the employer pays an employee's sick leave. They can get insurance cover for this for employees under 65 - but the insurance companies don't offer any policies for employers over 65 - no demand ...

Correct. But in order to make a useful judgement about this, you must be able to demonstrate that _you_ are in touch with reality.

Wrong. The very essence of presentation skills lies in the presenter creating the illusion that they are not only in touch with reality, but also on control of it. This is always a lie - reality has a way of sneaking around the best expert, and the real measure of expertise is that experts know how little they know.

The catch in this specious argument is the claim that Jim is _clearly_ in touch with reality. Jim knows enough about integrated circuit design to get by. He isn't great, but he's adequate. Outside that area he's depressively ignorant. You probably don't appreciate this, as you don't seem to read anything except your local newspaper. but that's not my problem.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Collectivism isn't exactly dominant in France. They just elected a confrontational right-wing nit-wit whose idea of solving social problems is to pay the workers less and degrade their conditions of service. The workers affected are not impressed, and are making their disaffection known.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

And their health care is better than yours, and it costs them less. If you were interested enough, you might even learn something. I'm not holding my breath.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Really, they could start re-running Kukla Fran and Ollie 24/7 and the quality of TV would improve. The writers crank out garbage and want to be called "creative." They need a union precisely because they are

They're not train drivers. If they stay on strike forever, the US will be better off.

John